Innholdsfortegnelse for December 28, 2020 i The New Yorker

Anthems The British podcast producer Hana Walker-Brown launched her new show, “Anthems,” in March, to mark International Women’s Day. The goal of the program, which provides an outlet for underrepresented voices to speak on issues that move them, is to offer a purposeful corrective to the predominantly white, predominantly male podcasting sphere. In each episode, the speaker (guests have included the writer Bernardine Evaristo, the body activist Jada Sezer, the editor Tobi Oredein, and the journalist Poorna Bell) takes on a single word, such as “failure,” “strength,” or “empire,” and then delivers a manifesto exploring her own definition of the term. What results is a heady combination of TED talk, literary reading, rousing impromptu lecture delivered in a smoky bar, and raw confessional.—Rachel Syme Lolita Podcast Very few books have…

There once was a chandelier at the Metropolitan Opera who thought that the audience was applauding just for him. The chandelier fell in love with one of the janitors, a man named Rocco, and wanted only Rocco to change his bulbs. Rocco returned the chandelier’s love, but when his boss found out about the affair he was fired. Late one night, Rocco broke into the Met and stole the chandelier. They settled into Rocco’s apartment, blissful in their union, the chandelier’s light blazing through the window onto the street below. This peculiar romance is not from a magical-realist novel or a quarantine fever dream. It’s an idea for a digital short that Julio Torres pitched again and again at “Saturday Night Live,” where he worked as a writer from 2016…

Anyone who came of age in the latter part of the twentieth century will recall the constant flow of animated cartoons that made up most of children’s programming on TV. In a culture of supposedly short memories, they were an art form that reached right back across time. On the radio, “oldies” were a separate genre within pop music, but on the kids’ shows there was a steady stream of cartoons from half a century’s creation, reality intruding mostly with commercials for pre-sweetened breakfast cereals. Everything ran together: bending, bug-eyed dogs and cats playing bad swing jazz on living clarinets from the thirties, spinach cans popping open and tattooed muscles popping up from the nineteen-forties, and Japanese animation of the sixties so limited that it hardly moved. There appeared to…

Nearly seven years ago, a shaggy singer with a shy smile introduced himself to America. “My name is Morgan Wallen, I’m twenty years old, I’m from Knoxville, Tennessee, and I’m currently a landscaper,” he said. He was standing on a stage in Los Angeles, competing for a spot on “The Voice,” one of those reality shows in which established stars offer aspiring ones a chance to discover, first hand, just how heartbreaking the music industry can be. He was wearing a tie and a cardigan, with shoulder-length hair and most of a beard, and he explained that his promising baseball career had been ended, during his senior year in high school, by a debilitating injury to his ulnar collateral ligament. “I’m just a normal small-town kid, and I really don’t…

If the words “Expressionist musical portrait of Mother Teresa performed in drag from East Village closet” make your heart beat faster—and how could they not?—you’re in luck. Get yourself to YouTube, where you can find Heather Christian’s “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” the latest offering from Theatre in Quarantine, a “pandemic performance laboratory” created by the writer, director, and actor Joshua William Gelb. The closet in question is in Gelb’s studio apartment. It is four feet wide, eight feet tall, and two feet deep, and, like a magician’s scarf-belching hat, contains astounding multitudes. Gelb has been using the closet as a stage since the start of the pandemic, when he emptied it of its contents, painted it white, and stuck a camera where the door used to be.…

ON BECOMING AHERETIC Larissa MacFarquhar’s article is a sensitive examination of the complexities of the child-custody cases that play out in civil courts when ultra-Orthodox Jewish parents make the wrenching decision to leave their community, and it adds an important dimension to the growing body of films, memoirs, and scholarship on the subject of those who abandon religion (“Solomon’s Dilemma,” December 7th). But in one description MacFarquhar’s casual tone could give a wrong impression. Voicing one source’s account of friends who have experienced a crisis of faith but haven’t left Hasidism, MacFarquhar writes that they “violated Shabbos all the time, watching sports, and just lied to their families about it.” In my book about religious Jews who lead double lives, “Hidden Heretics,” I find that people who have lost their…

EPIPHANY In an interview some years ago, I was asked when I realized that on occasion I could actually make people laugh. Remarkably, I knew. It was in Sunday school. I think I was in sixth grade. I was a shy little boy and, up to that point, insanely well behaved. The story that exemplifies that level of decorum—the only story of my grade-school years in Kansas City that my daughters have ever enjoyed hearing—goes like this: In about third grade, our teacher announced on a Monday morning that there would be an extra recess period on Friday for anyone who had gone the entire week without a check mark for any sort of misbehavior or disturbance. When Friday arrived, I was the only one in the class with no…

The Walker, by Matthew Beaumont (Verso). Contending that our “increasingly authoritarian” cities, with their omnipresent surveillance and commodified spaces, make the archetype of the flâneur—a privileged stroller who observes without being threatened—“unsustainable,” this heady blend of history and theory seeks more fitting literary models. The convalescent in Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” is a figure whose illness allows him, finally, to experience the city outside the daily grind. H. G. Wells’s “The Invisible Man” portrays a walker who is hounded and hunted. Beaumont depicts the city as unremittingly hostile, but his ambulatory antiheroes hint at ways in which we might reclaim the streets, declaring our freedom, as he puts it, “to wander and wonder at the same time.” Waste, by Catherine Coleman Flowers (New Press). Making the case for…

An early episode of the fourth season of “Big Mouth,” now streaming on Netflix, opens with the show’s protagonists, Andrew Glouberman and Nick Birch, embarking on their first day of eighth grade. “Look at us, growing up,” Nick (voiced by Nick Kroll) says. “Not like Bart Simpson. That yellow schmuck has been in fourth grade for, like, thirty years.” A clever but heartfelt cartoon that is bursting with pop-cultural references and is popular with adult viewers, “Big Mouth” owes more than a little to “The Simpsons.” (Even the use of “schmuck” is evocative of Krusty the Clown.) Still, Nick’s comment identifies the uniqueness of this series, created by Kroll, Andrew Goldberg, Mark Levin, and Jennifer Flackett. By allowing its characters to age—and by focussing in on them, to an almost…

DECEMBER 23 – 29, 2020 When the Rink at Rockefeller Center (above) opened, on Christmas Day in 1936, it was meant to be a temporary attraction. But the “skating pond,” as it was then known, has long since become a winter fixture of New York City. Holden Caulfield went on a date there in “The Catcher in the Rye,” and Truman Capote took to the ice for a Life magazine photo op. The rink is open to the public, for fifty-minute skating sessions, until Jan. 17; masks and advance tickets (via rockefellercenter.com) are required. ART “100 Drawings from Now” This invitational show, at the Drawing Center, in SoHo, speaks to our lockdown epoch with startling poignancy. All but one of the works were created since the pandemic’s onset. Few are…

Friends one and all! Let us unmute,Excite the timbrel and the lute,Make merry with our pots and pan(The hour is seven, so we can),Shout from the balcony or lawnFor joy at what will soon be gone,And praises sing for what is here:The end to this undreamt-of year!Commune with us, dear friends, while weStrew gifts abundant ’round the tree,And help us pick out something niceFor New York’s Dr. David Price,The Bronx’s Dr. Ernest Patti,Every nurse in Cincinnati,Dr. L. Woodward, of U. Miss.,Dr. Pernell (she’s our own Chris),L.A.’s Dr. Anna Darby,Arizona’s Dr. Barbee,Harold Varmus, the Nobel-er(Doc of reputation stellar),Ashley Bartholomew, R.N.And when we check the list againIt unscrolls out across the floor,With health-care stalwarts by the score—By the millions! Heroes true!(Forgive their student-loan debts—do!)As we replay two-oh in slo-mo,A Christmas cheer for…

When asked to describe the circumstances of her birth, the Surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington liked to tell people that she had not been born; she had been made. One melancholy day, her mother, bloated by chocolate truffles, oyster purée, and cold pheasant, feeling fat and listless and undesirable, had lain on top of a machine. The machine was a marvellous contraption, designed to extract hundreds of gallons of semen from animals—pigs, cockerels, stallions, urchins, bats, ducks—and, one can imagine, bring its user to the most spectacular orgasm, turning her whole sad, sick being inside out and upside down. From this communion of human, animal, and machine, Leonora was conceived. When she emerged, on April 6, 1917, England shook. The success of a creation story hangs on how richly…

Your first impression of “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 1918-1939,” a vast and exciting show, at the Museum of Modern Art, of interwar Soviet and European graphic design, may combine déjà vu and surprise. You likely know the look, loosely termed Constructivist: off-kilter geometric shapes, vectoring diagonals, strident typography (chiefly blocky sans serif), grabby colors (tending to black and orangeish red), and collaged or montaged photography, all in thrall to advanced technology and socialist exhortation, in mediums including architecture, performance, and film. But you won’t have seen most of the works here. About two hundred of the roughly three hundred pieces on view were recently acquired by the museum from the collection of Merrill C. Berman, a Wall Street investor and venture capitalist. Fresh images catch the eye, as…